


Broken-hearted Jubilee

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Angst, Let It Be era, M/M, Yoko's beautiful singing, minor fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 16:12:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12915480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: "I think I'll be leaving the band now."The Beatles, screaming.





	Broken-hearted Jubilee

George came back onto the expansive and freezing studio floor, a polystyrene cup of coffee gripped tightly in one hand. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other, and he informed Paul and John of his immediate intention. “I think I’ll be leaving the band now.” 

“When?” John asked, not skipping a beat.

“Now.” He dropped the cup in the bin by the door on his way out. 

In the confused moment of silence immediately afterwards, Ringo swung open the door to the bathroom and entered the hall. He was already seated at his drums before seeming to notice the odd atmosphere. “Miss anything?” He asked mildly. 

“Not much,” John replied, and his voice came distant and distorted to Paul’s hazy mind. “George left.”

“Oh. Well, you did put him in quite a mood. Suppose we’re calling it a day then?” 

“The band,” Paul said with effort. “Not the session. He left the band.” 

That was it. Paul’s mouth was dry; he could say nothing further. He wanted to be away from Twickenham, he wanted to be close to someone he loved and knew loved him back, shut away from the world – finally, he understood John’s approach. How he would embrace forgetting that the universe existed for a few hours, and retreating into himself, for _once_ not be needed to fix everything…

There was the scuffle of drumsticks scraping against skins, an involuntary movement, it seemed, as Ringo’s eyes turned to the ceiling, looking heavy and tired and not in the mood for playing. “Oh.” It was the same oh as before, and it carried the same message: unexpected, but not surprising. Sad, but not unusual. Paul felt a burning under the skin; he felt just as he had earlier in the day arguing with George, restless and powerless. It was in his nature to downplay the bad, but that was out of necessity, he knew no other way to continue functioning, but the same could not be said of Ringo’s flat resignation, or John’s flippancy. They had the tone of something darker, doom-leaden upon them. The powerless burning spread through his body to his extremities. His fingers itched to play something. 

The cameras were still rolling. Paul was briefly paralysed by the thought of this moment being caught on film, down to the disdain on George’s face, and whatever ghastly expression was on his own. There it would be, the effective end of the project: the Beatles splintered with the dull crash of a half-empty coffee cup hitting the bottom of the rubbish bin. 

There were other people in the hall now; Paul could see Mal and Michael in full view, Gyl trailing behind them, looking in wonder at the French windows out of which George had left them, and the amorphous black shape that was Yoko perched somewhere in his peripheral vision. She had come to the studio today all in black, with a black wide-brimmed hat to match, and she reminded Paul so much of a girl in a Halloween witch’s costume, though the clichéd thought ashamed him. John was beginning to explain the situation to Mal and Michael, in his usual callous terms, still seething more at the fight they’d had at lunch than at the sudden departure. 

“Bastard’s been a pain in the arse all day. Calling _my_ stuff unpolished. Name me one track of his he didn’t need me or Paul to hold his hand throughout, I’m telling you…” 

“He just left?” Mal. “He didn’t… ask for anything?”

“Why should he? He’s fed up with it all, he wants to leave. That’s fair enough at least.” John’s words were cold, but there was a thread of sincerity, almost longing. His face was turned away from Paul’s; Paul looked around the studio for something to fix his eyes on, and found the lonely mic George had been using before, to the right of the stage. His eyes flitted past Yoko before they rested on it. “Anyway, it’s not as if this is the end of the world,” John went on, a disembodied voice. “Doesn’t even need to be the end of the Beatles, not at all. What’s one guitarist over another?” 

Paul’s fingers itched again. His eyes moved across the hall to land on the grand piano, tucked in its neat little corner by the stage, and he did not notice himself wafting towards it and easing into the seat until his fingers were resting against cool ivory. It felt safer behind the great black structure, in his dark clothes. He felt less observed, and that brought a degree of calm to his overwrought senses. He supposed that in the all-consuming darkness of himself and his surroundings he and Yoko matched rather well. 

John was continuing to talk. Paul still had found no words to say, and a part of him sensed he ought to be there with John, discussing the plan of action, _leading_ the plan, just as he always did, but nothing would come forth. Nothing except music. 

He began with a run through of a little arrangement he’d been fiddling with, inspired by that Samuel Barber piece he’d heard. _Adagio for Strings_. The keys were resistant to his push; it was difficult to play quietly on this piano and be heard at all, and he knew that the sound must be disturbing whatever important conversation was happening a few feet away. The thought only soothed him. He could drown in this music, hopefully. _Adagio_ was slow and mournful, though, and together with his black clothes the whole thing felt too much like a funeral, for George or for the band, or for whomever. He switched to the most contrasting mood he could think of, and landed on _Martha My Dear_. 

Autumn colours and smells, paws scrambling over leaf-slicked paths, an enveloping presence of warm fur, mud streaks scuffed over the carpet, Jane laughing at Martha’s ways, _look what she’s done, silly girl!_ It was an insubstantial and weak distraction, but it did its job for a few moments, until other thoughts and memories made their way in. Recording this song all by himself, enjoying the freedom and solitude at the time. Feeling turned inside out when John gave it a listen, _tsked_ once, said _you don’t need us to help you with your golden oldie twaddle I see_ … John and he sitting cheek by jowl, eagerly deciding the order of the songs for their next album, and John agreeing wholeheartedly to start side two with his golden oldie twaddle, _it’s a nice upbeat one, take them high before dragging them down with_ I’m So Tired… 

One time through. Repeat. Repeat. It was an A-B-A structure; theoretically the song could go on forever. Paul wondered if he could make it last until George hurried back into the studio. 

He sat at the piano, and forgot the universe. No one asked him to return to the land of the living, so he did not. 

At some indefinable point in his playing, long after he had lost count of the run-throughs of _Martha My Dear_ he had performed, he heard movement nearer to him. Yoko was asking in muffled tones for a mic to be set up by the piano. He played ceaselessly and smoothly as Gyl did her bidding, and he tried to ignore the smell Yoko brought with her everywhere she went, that breathy nature smell mixed with cosmetics. When the mic was in place, Yoko stood behind it, blocking Paul’s view of the figures talking further off. Her hat filled his sight; he was blacked in from all sides now. 

“I’m a singer, not a dancer, baby…” John’s voice floated in through the sides of their strange little studio corner. The call of the compere, signalling for the show to begin.

She moaned into the mic, in what Paul belatedly recognised as some sort of accompaniment to his playing. Still _Martha My Dear_ from his end, but Yoko was singing something different. Paul had not heard it before, this strange moaning. It froze his blood; it was not appropriate to Yoko’s reticent nature, and yet it was, so utterly and horribly appropriate. He averted his eyes and focussed them on the keys. 

It was a soft, high moan. More of a sigh, really. Repeated, tuneless and out of time with the piano – a word, Paul finally realised. _“John,”_ Yoko keened, _“John, John, John…”_

Distantly, perhaps a million miles away, John’s voice called something in reply. Paul’s hands continued to move, in never-ending spirals of chords, swirling around Yoko’s monotonous refrain now, no longer doing his own bidding. John’s response to Yoko’s desperate whine seemed to send her into a frenzy; her voice rose to a cry. 

_“John… John… Joooohn!!”_ She sounded as though she were pleading for something. Pleading with John, who was now beginning to respond in earnest, the two of them performing a shrieking mating call across the studio floor, _John! Yoko! John! Yoko!_ What was she asking for? What did _she_ have to feel desperate about? The voice was raw, and there was a strain of rage in it too, the sort of outrage belonging to a young abandoned child. Paul’s fingers fell on the D-minor quavers which began the B section for the umpteenth time, but found he could not make them move from this position; he played the chord on repeat, building in power and urgency, until his fingers felt numb, and Yoko’s cry built with it, and the two sounds coalesced into an agonised scream. 

_“JOOOOOOHN!!!”_

Come back, please come back, come back. Where did you go? I need you with me. I need you to make it through this. Why leave me standing here on my own? But John did not respond to the call, and Paul did not stop playing, and Yoko did not stop screaming, because George had left the band, and he still had not come back. 

He didn’t leave the band, was Paul’s mind’s helpful correction. He left an asylum for the insane. 

There was something familiar about all of this, too. Paul felt that he had heard something like it once before – the memory hit him hard and brought forth a bout of nausea. That track, that abomination which had festered like a wound and consumed like a black hole at the back end of their last album, as far away from _Martha My Dear_ as one could get. At the first listen he remembered how he had felt at that beginning. He was expecting something strange, along the lines of his experiments which he had got bored of by the end of 1966, but he was not expecting it to sound so terrible, and he was certainly not expecting the first sound to be himself, playing the piano. A thin and lonely little composition which had gone nowhere – except here, to be buried in John and Yoko’s madness, distorted beyond recognition. Later, when the stylus was racing ever closer to the end of _Cry Baby Cry_ , Paul would sit by his turntable, his hand poised over the arm-lifter, ready to press down at the right moment, dreading that opening, the blood pounding in his ears at his own plea coming through the speakers: Brother can you take me back?

They were doing it again. Burying Paul in a black hole, in the rotting remains of his life’s work, where he would sit and wait for the inevitable.

Somewhere along the way, the piano was changed for a bass, and the jam expanded to include Ringo and John, with Yoko repositioned on the blue cushion which George had sat on hours – was it hours? Just hours? – before, behind that mic, the one which kept going wrong and electrocuting George, and each time he burned his hand he’d look at _Paul,_ as though even this was his fault – Paul wouldn’t say that he _hoped_ that the mic would fry Yoko too, but he certainly thought about it as a potential outcome. 

They were all screaming now. They were not creating, and Paul was not sure what they were destroying, but they were screaming. Ringo screamed with his drums, Yoko with her smiling red mouth and glittering black eyes, Paul with his bass held lovingly and ear-splittingly close to the amplifier, and John screamed with everything, his guitar, his head, his hair. Paul had lost the feeling in his fingers some time ago, and he stared at John, awed at how alive he looked, worlds away from the blank-eyed glower he’d settled into for the past month. When John threw back his head and yelled in a tone Paul could only describe as exultant, Paul wondered if this was what John had wanted from the start. _Anti-music_. The perfect freedom from everything, even Paul – to de-create and to scream at the world like the day he was born. If John wanted that, and Yoko could give it to him, who was Paul to try and reign him in? 

Ringo shook his head from side to side; silhouetted against the sickly warm lighting he looked ape-like, primeval. Paul hardly moved at all. An image of himself from a thousand years ago, jumping up and down on a stage in sheer excitement, flitted through his mind. 

_“Fuck you!”_ That was John, obviously, shouting to the hell their instruments made. Yoko cut short her indistinct wailing, and seemed to take the sentiment on board. 

_“Fuck yooou... Fuck yoooou...”_

They didn’t shout at each other so much anymore, or hurl insults the way they had through 1968. But that was only because Paul had all but given up as a leader, and had stopped giving John such a hard time over his music. He was willing to let things be, which meant weakly suggesting different directions without seeming too authoritarian, and letting Yoko come into the studio whenever she wanted, and praising John for any scrap of creativity he provided, however undeveloped. John, for his part, had stopped cutting him up with words, switching to silence as a healthy, crueller alternative. Paul had hoped that in noticing his concessions and compromises John might be moved enough to come back to him, that he may recognise some of his own feelings of abandonment and fear in Paul’s own countenance. Instead, mostly he treated Paul more and more as a non-entity, as though he were just a smudge, a blurred black shape to be eaten by this massive studio. 

Sometimes, of course, he didn’t. Sometimes it was great, better than it had been before, when they’d lose themselves in a jam like they were now, only playing the songs they knew, the ones from long before Brian had spotted them in the Cavern. They’d play old Lennon/McCartneys that no one had or ever would hear, or standards that brought them right back to Hamburg. But they were memories, all of them, reprieves from the present into the past. They ended quickly.

Now John had taken down his apathetic walls, and Paul willed him to turn around, to stop gazing at Yoko and to turn that expression of keen excitement and rage and attentiveness towards _him_. It took a hellish amount of screaming, in which Paul silently but willingly participated, until finally John swivelled his head around and his eyes met Paul’s, for a split second. The brevity of the look was worse than if he hadn’t looked at all; Paul felt whatever a lightbulb feels when it is switched on for the first time in years by accident, only to hastily be switched off again. He was outliving his usefulness. Couldn’t even say anything when George left the band. 

A few moments later, Ringo threw his sticks into the air with a cry, and Paul noticed a flash of red on the edge of the drums. “I’m finished,” Ringo moaned. The jam ended. 

“Well,” John said, panting with adrenaline, “I certainly feel _much_ better after that. Don’t you?” 

Paul tried to pinpoint a time when he had felt worse. He gave up, pulled the cord out connecting his bass to the amp, laid the bass on the floor and left the studio floor to go to the bathroom. He felt that he was being watched as he left, but whether by Yoko or by John, he could not tell. 

He was just finishing his piss when John barrelled into the men’s room. Paul caught his eye in the mirror as he sidled up to the urinal next to his. 

“You’ve been quiet,” John said, after they were both finished, and neither had left the room. “What’s your take on all of it?” 

“The jam? Thought it a little too repetitive to be turned into a single. Maybe a filler track.” 

“Not that, ye tit. George. What d’you reckon we should do about him? Normally I’d have expected the master McCartney plan by now.” John scratched his forearm; the way the light bounced off his glasses made his eyes impenetrable. 

“We could try and convince him to come back.” It was a simple-sounding solution, and yet it had taken Paul so many hours to voice it. Why? “He’s been pissed off about all sorts of things lately, not just… Being in the band. Like Twickenham –”

“He’s sick of _us_ , Paul. That’s what it’s really about. And I’m done making concessions for his benefit. If he wants out, he’s out.” 

He spoke with the same sort of authority he’d done back in 1960, talking about Stuart, _he’s not pulled his weight since setting eyes on that bird… If he can’t stick it, he’s out, I tell you_ … But this was _George._ Paul shook his head at the notion. “You don’t mean…”

“Where were you earlier when we talked about all this? I suggested we get Eric in to play his parts. Ritchie didn’t seem too pleased with the idea.” 

“You did – _what?_ ” Eric. _Eric_. Did Paul and John even breathe the same air anymore? ‘His parts’, as if all George had ever been was a spare guitar. “Fucking _hell_ , John. This is why I’m the one they get to make the decisions.” 

“Fuck off. You weren’t saying anything. And you’re deluded if you think George’ll just come crawling back.” 

“What do you know about George, then?” When had John ever looked at George twice, more like. 

“I know he sees the writing on the wall, just like the rest of us.” John stopped scratching at his arm to pull a cigarette out of the pack in his back pocket. “Except you, apparently. Lighter?” 

“What do you mean?” The walls were closing in. The jam had done nothing to reduce tension, nothing at all, it had only expressed the despair they were all feeling: the writing on the wall. Extinction. The thought was too much for Paul to bear; he reminded himself that John and George were misguided, that they were off their heads and that they’d come round, once a live concert was played, once they all found that groove once again, because they _would_ find it, it wasn’t really magic, it was just sounds and emotions and _them_ , and they were the same four men as they’d always been, weren’t they, and nothing had to change unless they let it, and the writing on the wall was just another expression, a little witticism that John only said because it sounded poetic… 

“What do you mean, what do I mean? Give me a light. I know you’ve got one.” Paul did. He flicked it into life, and John leaned close to it, holding the cigarette between his lips, and the flame licked up in his eyes when he looked past the lighter and straight at Paul. He was close enough that Paul felt the breath from his nostrils tickle the tips of his knuckles. He stayed in the position longer than necessary, still looking intently at Paul, and Paul tried with all of his being to decipher the expression. It was not affection, but it did not look like outright loathing either. Interest, curiosity? Confusion? Was John trying to suss him out too, at the same time? Was he sad, regretful of those damning words? Why did Paul’s mind only produce the word _hungry?_

There was fire in John’s eyes, Paul realised, and not just reflected from the lighter. “Ta,” he said between his teeth. 

Paul found the words he wanted to say. “We can’t do that again.” 

“What?” 

“ _That_. That noise. It’s not us.” When they screamed, Paul just felt drowned out. “And Yoko…” 

“What about her?” John had withdrawn from Paul to take a long drag from the cigarette and blow the smoke skywards, but now he leaned in again, and Paul leaned backwards, his hands clutching the sink edge. 

“ _She’s_ not us. She’s not George. Not you, either. Not me.” 

“No?” John had one hand raised slightly, the one not holding his cigarette. It hovered between the two of them, uncertain. Perhaps he meant to hit Paul – the last time he had dared question Yoko’s presence, John had punished him with inane critiques of his music and person for the rest of the studio day, driving Paul nearly completely out of composure. That had been months ago. _No?_ His word nearly broke Paul’s heart, but then something shifted in his eyes. “No,” he breathed, “No, she’s definitely not you.” 

“What do you want, John?” Paul asked tersely. His palm slipped a little on the ceramic curve of the sink. 

John seemed to consider the question for a few seconds, before the uncertain hand took a flight of courage, and grasped Paul at the back of the head, to pull his face towards John’s, to pull their lips together. For a moment, Paul let himself be transported by the moment, gave his analytical mind a break from the constant mystery that was John, and melted into the kiss. There was none of the aggression of some of their kisses from a year ago, but it wasn’t passionate and lustful the way things had been before, either. It was… Well, from John’s end, Paul had no idea. To him, for at least a second, it felt like reassurance.

Whatever it was, it was brief and more than a little awkward, and John let him go quickly. After a moment, with John’s hand still upon him, now resting on his shoulder, and his eyes staring, yes, _definitely_ hungrily, into Paul’s, Paul wiped his mouth. “Charming,” he said, the word coming out high and tinny. “Thanks for reminding me of that.” His black turtleneck seemed to cling tighter around his throat. He was going to break down completely in a moment, unless they were both careful. Just forget it, he reasoned with himself. A mistake, that’s all it was. John’ll say it was just a mistake, a product of the heated emotions. Don’t read into it. “I’ll be going, then,” he added brusquely, and pushed past John.

John’s hand caught him on the way out. “Don’t go.” He sounded desperate. Desperate as Yoko had sounded, but how sincere was that? Paul looked resolutely at the door. “I thought… You were begging for me.”

Paul’s heart stuttered. “That was Yoko.” _John, John, John._

“I know that. Fuck.” John's voice wobbled slightly, and Paul's mind started instinctively making the usual, familiar connections: he feels regretful, he won't tell you as much but you can feel it in his voice, he just wants to hear you forgive him... But that was the old John, surely, not the cold-eyed John of today. Paul turned back to him, met his eyes again, and an inkling of the telepathy they’d once had fluttered up inside him, and perhaps in that infernal jam when John had looked at him and switched on the lights for a split-second, perhaps _John’s_ lights had been turned on too, and perhaps this was what they both wanted after all– “ _Paul –_ ”

Paul was not the type to let the things he wanted go. They clutched each other, kissing again and again, those reassurances, the physical and intimate equivalent of their jam sessions dedicated to old 50s songs, their little forays down musical memory lane. No longer screaming and saying nothing, they said everything they needed to without words. Paul treasured every moment of it.

I don’t want it to be this way. _Don’t leave me standing here._

Me neither. I’m sorry. _All I want is you._

Thank you. Thank you. _I’ll wait till tomorrow, till you come my way._ Thank you.

I don’t want this to end. _Don’t let me down._

It won’t have to. _You and I have memories…_

It would, though, of course. John had damned it. The writing was on the wall; the words of the prophets, written on the subway walls. 

“No need to cry,” John murmured into his ear, just once, before finally pulling away. “I didn’t mean it. It’ll turn out all right.” Paul made sure to commit that to memory, that aching tenderness. Right now John was looking at him and kissing him like he wanted him, more than anything in the world. But John didn’t know what he wanted, that was the trouble, and Paul could not endure being caught off guard when he changed his mind again.

It was a strange day. The ringing of the jam still echoed in Paul’s ears like traumatic residue, but his lips remembered something tranquil and unspoiled. He had spoken and achieved less today than he had in quite a while, and yet when he clicked the door of Cavendish closed, he was struck with a tiredness down to the bones which pulled his limbs and head downwards. He scrambled his way up to bed without any supper, fully clothed, and slowly but surely his analytical mind returned, trying in its brave little way to piece the situation into something manageable.

That night, Paul dreamt of his mother. When he woke, there were tears of absolution on his face, and music in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by, and partially verbatim from the tapes of January 10th 1969, which are available on the incomparable amoralto's tumblr, complete with transcripts. A video of the jam session is also there, and it's some pretty horrifying stuff. I thought that particular day had some potential for character study in it, so voila. 
> 
> Paul does get most of the focus, thoughts-wise. As for John's motivation, I'll leave that to you... Hope you like it!


End file.
